Giving an Account of Oneself. euphoria, will to life and circular view of an “eternal return” Talk About That in 5516 words and repetition of life. Nietzsche is seen as a character struggling with incoherence and enclosure, with the notion of primordial Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev impulse and of restituting “to the very act of thinking the virtue of resistance to any ‘conceptualization’.”3 The image of the forearms and hands in a holding position appears in the single- “I do not see it as a second world, it is part of ours.. . channel video Happy Birthday!!! (2014),4 which starts with a I mainly make videos, using computer-generated technologies. still HD (high-definition) image of a stereotypically handsome They speak to the structure and to the way images are made man in the prime of his life, with the date 2016 written on his contemporaneously; about quite fundamental aspects of human forehead in a distorted script that both suggests a tattoo yet also experience of love, or death or sex or relations generally. . . clearly makes digital techniques manifest. I always had a problem with pointing a camera at someone, Happy Birthday!!! is such a trite expression, usually whereas generating an image in a computer, there’s no victim. spoken as a mere formality and with no thought about what The figures in the videos are surrogates, stand-ins for real people. lurks beneath the reference to our birth – our inexorable Because they’re not real, and it’s me that’s performing them, I feel mortality chronicled by the years of our life. The triteness of the I can do more to them, treat them worse. .. . The CG world is a very words “happy birthday,” compared to the immense dimension inhospitable place. There’s pleasure in making them, but I’m not of life to which it refers, recalls a similar contrast in the 1971 a creature that lives in a cupboard. The videos are demanding, poem by Gilbert Sorrentino The Morning Roundup, which solicit and beg for recognition. I want people to be totally appears as an epigraph to this book, in the voiceover of the video immersed, not like in a cinema where you forget yourself, but in work Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths, as well as in the live that way that you’re constantly reminded of yourself.”1 Ed Atkins performance Synonyms: One or Two Noise-making Rifts, in which Atkins rehearses the poem and its impossible, recuperative The book you hold in your hands is an artist’s book, in so attempt over and over again: far as the bulk of its pages have been constructed by the artist as a collage of imagery, text and graphic elements, gleaned from I don’t want to hear any news on the radio the worlds of his video works from the last four years and their about the weather on the weekend. Talk about that. source material. You will find, for example, an image of the Barberini Faun, the Hellenistic marble sculpture of a drunken Once upon a time and sleeping satyr in the Glyptothek in Munich. For centuries a couple of people were alive after it had been found in a ditch in Rome, the sculpture was in who were friends of mine. the collection of the Barberini family. After numerous attempts to acquire it over the years, Ludwig of Bavaria finally bought it The weathers, the weathers they lived in! in 1814 and it was sent to Germany five years later. The reclining Christ, the sun on those Saturdays.5 figure, his legs wide open, unabashedly sexual, exhibits a chipped off, flaccid penis, and still today inspires marvel at an In the mad and histrionic collage of references to dates oxymoronic paradox: how could something so carefully and that make up Happy Birthday!!!, those of his father (1950–2009) intentionally crafted, so coldly marble and still, represent a come up, as do other dates much less connectable to Atkins’ real state of being so uncertain and unconscious – whether sleeping, life, like 1872. The work refers to memory time and to moments drunk, or possibly even dead? Atkins’ own contemporary in time and their repetition, to the loss of those moments, to version of the Barberini Faun, carefully crafted into three the pain in that loss, and to the ways in which we say goodbye variations, is the desperately lonely character in Ribbons (2014), to people over and over again as we internalize them, to the on view in this exhibition today, a digital surrogate who drinks way that an embrace of another person could be an embrace himself to sleep in bars in search of love, yet finds only holes in of ourselves. The flow of images that make up the video is the wall through which to stuff his nose or fingers or dick.2 accompanied by Atkins’ own voice speaking a first-person Another image that comes up in this book shows a pair narrative about a now that is eternally returning: “Every Sunday, of forearms and hands in a holding position, as if supporting every Sunday in 1951.. . it’s 1872.. . I remember, I remember .. . an invisible soccer ball or cradling someone’s head in one’s lap. this time next year.” This image actually refers to an erotic and murderous drawing Now is the Fall of 2016, and the book you hold was made by Pierre Klossowski of a young man suffocating an invalid titled over the last six months on the occasion of Atkins’ exhibition at Suprême vision de frère Damien. Klossowski’s essay on Friedrich Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and Fondazione Nietzsche is included in Atkins’ reading list published on page Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Now is one year after the artist’s 236 of this book. This reading list, although not an “artwork” in double presentation of his video Hisser on two floors of a run- the standard sense, forms part of our exhibition. We purchased down wooden building that had until recently been a hospice all the books he recommended for the library of the Castello di for the sick. Located on Büyükada Island on the Bosphorus, Rivoli, and there they will remain, gathered together according an island where subjects were exiled from antiquity, the house to the “provenance principle” of archives, for future readers had originally belonged to a Greek family – a community who and passers-by to come. In his long essay, Klossowski gives an had lived in the area for thousands of years, but who, like the artist’s account of Nietzsche’s intensity, depression, Dionysiac Armenians, were brutally exiled from Turkey in the first part of

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Giving an Account of Oneself. Talk About That in 5516 words 13 the twentieth century. The video was inspired by a true story of Now is nineteen years after 1997, a date inscribed like Atkins who grew up on the cusp of when computers became that led to the catastrophes of the mid-century. Atkins recalls a man in Florida who died in his sleep when his house slid into a a digital tattoo on the forehead of the character in Happy ubiquitous, could the “upper regions” be nothing other than so- one of the founders of collage, the German Dada artist Hannah sinkhole. In twenty minutes, it describes a series of vignettes in Birthday!!!. When asked by email what 1997 refers to, since called RL – real, corporeal life? And could the “art of conducting Höch (1889–1978); the way in which she picked up scissors the final stages of the male character’s life at night in his bedroom, for me it was an important year (the year I saw Catherine oneself in the lower regions” be the ethics and modalities by and cut up magazines and reconfigured their fragments to prior to an earthquake and a sinkhole that swallows him and David’s documenta in Kassel), Atkins answered simply, “1997 is which we choose to act – or not to act in the virtual realm, as carefully craft the material “badly” was a violent political act of the entire room up into a final ecstatic release (death? orgasm?) much more about a feeling. Not history, not present, just 1997. a conscious engagement with it in the light of enhancing the opposition and resistance; it was conscious – what Atkins would represented as an abstract dive into water. At first dreaming and Something lyrically ambivalent there.. . ” Lyrically ambivalent flourishing of embodied life on our planet? call “reflexive” – literally a cutting-edge art. then awake and sleepless, he looks at Rorschach stains, then – that is, unstable, uncertain, in a time out of time, or in a time There used to be a website, www.edatkins.co.uk, but I In a contemporary equivalent mode to picking up those masturbates to the postcard of Walter Sickert’s painting Ennui that repeats cyclically over and over again, potentially joining cannot find it anymore. When I click on it, the web tells me the magazines, Atkins purchased a CG (Computer Generated) model (1914) and another of the Barberini Faun. This is the quietest the simplicity of experience and profoundness of knowledge; site has expired or the hosting has been removed. Talk about of a male character from the Turbosquid.com website that sells and most narrative of Atkins’ recent works and, except for the a feeling of something in-between, not quite proper history, that. Once upon a time films were made of celluloid and there stock 3D models and texture maps used in computer graphics by billowing of curtains in the wind, nothing much seems to happen like 1872, but no longer in the present here and now of 2016. were DVDs. creative consumers we sometimes call “prosumers,” who want to before the cataclysmic end. The subject is lonely, in a state of Something like 2009, perhaps. “It is difficult to write about Ed because he is so create a game or a VR (Virtual Reality) or AR (Augmented Reality) waiting and exile from active life. In coming to terms with the relationship between analog intelligent and he is probably the best person to speak about project. Then he used the Faceshift software – a program that, And now is six months after the premiere of the artist’s and digital, offline and online, the body in love and our projected his own work there could ever be,” says a common friend of alongside Microsoft Kinect and a slew of other software products, video installation Safe Conduct in a white-cube space of the and syncopated relations at a distance over time or through ours who wishes to remain anonymous. This fact indicates an captures motion and expression from a live performer that can Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. In its neutrality, the space, another lyrically ambivalent figure comes to mind – René extreme form of self-awareness and reflexivity, which is both then be used to animate the computer generated figure. He space in Copenhagen was somewhat reminiscent of an airport – as Daumal, a French poet and writer of the “Simplistes” group (as a symptom of, and a resistance to, an exploded and explosive began to experiment, using his own self as the actor, transferring are all museum white cubes – thus abetting the core subject matter opposed to the Surrealists). Daumal died in 1944 at the young age “mirror stage” of contemporary society, within which the facial expressions and voice to the surrogate or avatar on his for the video, which plays to the music of Ravel’s Bolero from a of 36 from tuberculosis, probably or partly caused by an excessive digital world of immediate gratification and prediction enfolds laptop like a video selfie in so far as he turned the camera on triad of video walls reminiscent of those you might find streaming use of inhaled drugs through which he had induced mystical us all, and where authenticity and sincerity, let alone the old the laptop toward himself.10 This is something similar to what news broadcasts in a Terminal. The airport is a contemporary experiences since 1924. Shortly before dying, Daumal was in concept of spontaneity, seem long-gone worthless notions. In ventriloquists have historically tried to do: to move life from the space of “safe” passage – yet also of fear, where travelers today the midst of writing the short allegorical novel Mount Analogue, the “old” Lacanian psychoanalytic, twentieth-century terms of body of the ventriloquist to that of a puppet by moving it and must willingly subject themselves to (and are subjugated by) scans, which was first published posthumously in French in 1952. my generation, ours is a world where the “real” seems no longer throwing their voice. In this way, the singular traits of the actor searches, and controls in the name of security and protection from Mount Analogue, which is also included in Atkins’ reading accessible via the “imaginary” and through the “symbolic” are lost and something like the essence of his or her expressions potential terrorists or madmen, who haunt the imaginations of the list, tells the story in clear, scientific detail of the discovery because the symbolic order – that is, the order of language – has is distilled and remapped onto a new character, a persona – albeit authorities as bloodthirsty characters in search of verification of and ascent of a mountain whose summit is impossible to reach been ejected by the “imaginary”. The myth of a perfect future one radically retarded by comparison. our corporeality through the destruction and fragmentation of our but whose base is accessible to humans, suggesting an active that technology should be able to offer us, to the degree that Atkins has used this process to capture himself, recording bodies, thus affirming paranoiac states of exception. and empirical journey that cannot reach its metaphysical we madly chase after a direct relationship between the organic his own voice and facial movements on his laptop, to people a Now is also thirty-four years since Atkins’ birth and seven destination. Along the way, they find peradams, objects that (so-called “life”) and the technological imaginary (our “smart” number of videos that are then screened in exhibition spaces since his father’s death in 2009. are of material substance but that reveal themselves visibly and devices and digital prostheses), and what it can and might do for via large projections, often onto leaning and free-standing walls. Most people’s fathers die before they do, but for Atkins this tangibly only to their seekers. The novel ends mid-sentence and and with us in the future. His solitary male characters live in a world of emotional fragility, fact of life became a founding moment just before his graduation darkly with a comma, and suggests the paradox of collapsing To tell the story differently: for several years, Atkins solitude, depression and melancholy, pathetically suggesting the from art school: it marked the start of his practice as a video ecosystems: “without them, a quantity of plants that are experimented with HD video, thinking about it critically disorientation and potential collapse of white male subjectivity maker with the creation of his first HD video Paris Green. His very important in fixing unstable terrains,” The sentence through a number of tools, which included reading texts such at the start of the twenty-first century. By also working with father was a graphic designer and an artist and writer in his own describes the extinction of a rat species who ate sick wasps; as a as The Space of Literature (1955) by Maurice Blanchot, which is performance, where the artist is present, adjacent to or apart right, but never wished to show the world his art. The degree consequence of the loss of the rats, the diseased wasps’ illness also on his reading list. Blanchot speaks of the disappearance from the projection screen, or appearing simply as himself while to which his death and its mourning are intimately connected spread to the healthy wasps until the wasps also became extinct, of a “real life” referent to which images seem to allude to, and reading a beautiful text in front of an audience, the Brechtian to the emergence of Atkins’ own artistic work is unfathomable, suggesting a negative chain reaction with a future collapse of the thus of the corpse as a paradoxically perfect image where “real” “fourth wall” is brought inside the space of the artwork. Contrary but forms the subject matter of an extremely important piece plant system whose reproduction depended on the wasps, and and “referent” coincide, since in a corpse the subject has surely to the goal-oriented production of VR games, which might be to of diaristic writing by Atkins, reproduced in this book on p. 188, thus of the stability of the ground under our feet and earth itself. disappeared – it has literally died. In critical writings about his construct the best possible illusion, Atkins reveals, in a typically a commentary on his father’s diaries, which he read snatches In the “Notes Found Among the Author’s Papers,” art, as well as in his own statements in interviews, Atkins often modern impulse toward authenticity, the magician’s trick as a of after his death.6 In this essay, published online just a few published as an appendix to Daumal’s philosophical novella, one underlines how his art attempts to reveal the cadaveric qualities, trick. What a relief, we feel, that there is somewhere, somehow, months after the loss, the artist writes, “Recently, my father died of the most cited quotes on the internet appears: the violent deathly impulses and aspirations behind the desire a subject who is simply a person. And if there is a person that of cancer. And although this was sudden (and yet protracted, as to achieve extremely mimetic and hyperreal representations is real, then the technology is also real enough that we may ask modern death tends to be) and afforded little time to ‘prepare,’ You cannot stay on the summit forever – You have to that high-definition technology voraciously and capitalistically about the politics of its production – who are the workers that he left behind a vast body of work through which one might come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just seeks: the skin that really does look like skin – hair and built the cell phone, the tablet and its case, what were their wages posthumously get to know him better.” While at the hospital this. What is above knows what is below – But what is blemishes included. At first, this was achieved through the and do they have any leisure time themselves. and completely passive in the hands of nurses and doctors, his below does not know what is above. ..You climb, see. typically modernist strategy of revealing the truth behind the We wish to tell our stories, and in so doing what might father still kept notebooks, written almost daily until his death, You descend and see no longer. But one has seen! There illusion, by making visible what HD video tries to hide behind it mean to give an account of ourselves and try to be painfully that were “brutally, painfully honest, describing in astonishingly is an art of conducting one’s self in the lower regions by a seamless flow of images. This is achieved through the cutting honest and uninhibited? Perhaps because we wish to reaffirm uninhibited terms his terrible decline.”7 Atkins suggests that it the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no and pasting and un-synchronous layering of sound and image, our agency as well as reconstitute our relations in so doing. is precisely through this self-reflexive activity of observing one’s longer see, one does at least still know.9 through sudden ruptures and jumps, short apparitions of promo Although so different generationally and in appearance, life declining that his father was able to transcend the situation title pages, the visible use of filters and much more, which in Atkins’ videos and performances may be read from this of passivity and gain a form of agency and thus freedom: “In In a strange reversal of Plato’s cave (where mortals are modernist terms is a collage technique. Atkins’ rebellion against perspective in historical dialog with a number of earlier, pre- his chronicling of his illness and his desperately reluctant down below in matter and know there is a higher world of ideas the seamlessness of HD recalls the work of early modernists, digital practices that are accounts of the artist. From Surrealist capitulation to the indignity of dependence, he affirms his agency of which they can only catch a glimpse as shadows reflected resisting the machine of advertising and spectacle in the early experiments with film to late twentieth-century works by rather than resigns.”8 from their fire onto the walls of the cave), for people like twentieth century, itself a tragic era of blind faith in progress artists such as Bruce Nauman, Joan Jonas and Dan Graham, we

14 Ed Atkins Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Giving an Account of Oneself. Talk About That in 5516 words 15 find investigations into subjectivity through the observation Attempts to give such truthful accounts abound in So thou, sick world, mistak’st thy self to be 3 P. Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (Chicago: The University of and recording of the artist’s own experience as it is altered or documentary literary history, many of which are collected in the Well, when alas, thou’rt in a lethargy. Chicago Press, 1997), 345. constructed by recording technologies. In different ways, artists extraordinary compilation of personal testimonies published . . . 4 In Happy Birthday!!! the two arms and hands appear bare, yet the same holding have asked, “Who am I and how do the optical technological by John Carey, Eyewitness to History (1997), also in Atkins’ And freely men confess that this world’s spent, position recalls the arms clad in a white lace shirt in the earlier video Even devices at hand shape who I am?” Indeed, Nauman explored reading list. In his introduction to this book of reportage, Carey When in the planets and the firmament Pricks (2013), where they appear more feminine and motherly, and thus hover the limits of the body and of the everyday by filling one- writes, “All knowledge of the past which is not just supposition They seek so many new; they see that this in ambiguity between love and aggression. hour videotapes with repeated actions in the studio such as derives ultimately from people who can say, ‘I was there,’ as Is crumbled out again to his atomies. 5 G. Sorrentino, New and Selected Poems 1958–1998 (Copenhagen and Los bouncing against a wall in a corner of a room (Bouncing in the assortment of chance bystanders, travellers, warriors, ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, Angeles: Green Integer, 2004), 143. the Corner, 1968) or by putting on make-up in front of a film murderers, victims, and professional reporters I assemble All just supply, and all relation; 6 Atkins is a prolific writer. In our digital times of cognitive capitalism, the camera for ten minutes in Art Make-Up (1967). In works such as here can. Another advantage is stylistic. Eye-witness accounts Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot, “content providers” are the key class figures serving power and therefore they Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972), Jonas investigated the have the feel of truth because they are quick, subjective and For every man alone thinks he hath got are also those who are able to undermine or affect dominant narratives through relationship between her body engaging on stage with props incomplete, unlike objective or reconstituted history, which is To be a phoenix, and that then can be alternative non-productive writing. Atkins’ screenplays, critical writings and including mirrors and masks and her recorded mediated image laborious but dead.”13 Reading the accounts contained in Carey’s None of that kind, of which he is, but he. other scripts are histrionic, hyperbolic, melancholy and pathetic speech acts projected back on the same stage to create a feedback loop, thus anthology makes reality seem more horrid and outrageous . . . that partly recall Surrealist writing. Not by chance, Comte de Lautréamont’s addressing the way the self is always fragmented and shifting, than we could possibly imagine. It begins with Thucydides’ She to whom this world must it self refer, Chants de Maldoror (1874) are also in Atkins’ reading list for the Castello di doubling and splicing. Graham tested his consciousness of description of the Plague of Athens in 430 BC: “The disease As suburbs or the microcosm of her, Rivoli library. A book of Atkins’ collected writings appears this year: A Primer corporeality through its relation with the media: the camera is began, it is said, in Ethiopia beyond Egypt, and then descended She, she is dead; she’s dead: when thou know’st this, for Cadavers (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016). an extension of the body in works such as Body Press (1970–72), into Egypt and Libya, and spread over the greater part of the Thou know’st how lame a cripple this world is.15 7 Published in Art Vehicle online, no. 48, 2009, column “Asides” no. 13: where two subjects literally pressed 16mm cameras against King’s territory. Then it suddenly fell upon the city of Athens, http://www.artvehicle.com/asides/13, accessed August 26, 2016. their bodies while recording each other. Like Atkins’ videos, and attacked first the inhabitants of the Peiraeus.. . I shall And yet there is a humility in the recognition of the 8 Ibid. these works can appear narcissistic. In many ways, however, to describe its actual course, explaining the symptoms, from the failure to give an account of oneself that Butler assumes as 9 R. Daumal, Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean record the subject – to give an account of oneself – can only be study of which a person should be best able, having knowledge positive and healing: “The ‘I’ finds that, in the presence of the Adventures in Mountain Climbing (Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala, 1986), 110. attempted through an excess of reflexivity, the ability to observe of it beforehand, to recognize it if it should ever break out other, it is breaking down. It does not know itself; perhaps it 10 “A new world yawns open,” he said of the first time he used face-recognition oneself while acting. again. For I had the disease myself and saw others sick of it.”14 never will. But is that the task, to know oneself? Is the final aim technology. “Sitting there, pulling faces to entertain myself with an avatar In her 2005 book Giving an Account of Oneself, which is The collection of writings, intensely macabre and grotesque in to achieve an adequate narrative account of a life? And should of me, a live feed? It’s like, ‘Oh, god, I could be trapped here,’ you know? This also included in Atkins’ reading list and in the book collection its accumulation of depicted cruelty, ends with a reportage of it be? Is the task to cover over through a narrative means the horrendous clinch between me and – me and what?” (E. Atkins in The New in our library, Judith Butler suggests how such an attempt the Sabra and Chatila 1982 massacre, written just hours after breakage, the rupture, that is constitutive of the ‘I,’ which quite Yorker, May 20, 2016). is bound up with the ethical imperative of responsibly (from the events occurred: “They were everywhere, in the road, in forcefully binds the elements together as if it were perfectly 11 J. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, “to respond”) giving an account of oneself to another. Butler laneways, in backyards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled possible, as if the break could be mended and defensive mastery 2005), 4–5. summarizes Adorno’s view on the rise of moral questions in a masonry and across the tops of garbage tips. The murderers – restored? Before the other one cannot give an account of the 12 A. Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfood, translated by P. A. subject expressed through a refusal of societal norms that are the Christian militiamen whom Israel had let into the camp to ‘I’ who has been trying all along to give an account of itself. A Kottman (London: Routledge, 2000). violently imposed once they have ceased to be self-evident in ‘flush out the terrorists’ fourteen hours before – had only just certain humility must emerge in the process, perhaps also a 13 J. Carey, Eyewitness to History (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2003), the life of a community: “there seems to be a tension between left. In some cases blood was still wet on the ground. When we certain knowingness about the limits of what there is to know.”16 xxix ethos and morality, such that a waning of the former is the had seen hundreds of bodies, we stopped counting.” I believe Atkins might agree. 14 Ibid., 1. condition for the waxing of the latter. . .this ethos becomes Atkins’ works mourn a subject and the failures of This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with 15 J. Donne, The Complete Poems of John Donne, ed. by Robin Robbins (London violence only once it has become an anachronism. What is representation in the digital age. He expresses this in his a whimper.17 and New York: Routledge, 2013), 815 ff. strange historically – and temporally – about this form of writings, videos and performances through a bathos that 16 Butler, Giving an Account, 69. ethical violence is that although the collective ethos has become straddles the media: strings of declarative sentences might 1 Atkins’ statement in an interview made during his exhibition at the Stedelijk 17 T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” which I allude to here, is not on Atkins’ anachronistic, it has not become past; it insists itself into the just easily trail off with “etc.” or manifest as jump-cut effects, Museum in Amsterdam in 2015, http://arttube.nl/en/video/Stedelijk/Ed_ reading list. See T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems & Plays (London: Faber & Faber, present as an anachronism.”11 In order to pursue the aim of less landscapes, faces, farts. The world he evokes is falling apart, Atkins, accessed August 29, 2016. 2004). violence in the world (itself Butler’s main underlying goal in all not dissimilarly to the world of the Mannerist period, by (ill) 2 Most video works by Ed Atkins deal with a similar re-corporealizing of the her writings) it is necessary to reflect, she continues, on how the means of blind faith, both in religions and in scientific and male body as a political act. Such an act could be read as feminist because becoming-subject attempts to respond to the question “Who are technological advancements, so poignantly described in the the male figure is rarely corporeal in art and more often portrayed as an agent you?” when it is asked by another subject whose engagement erotic and religious poems by John Donne, also on Atkins’ of social transformation. In an essay called “Whose Body Matters? Feminist with us through this very question constitutes the basis of our reading list, whose well-known 1611 poem of mourning, An Sociology and the Corporeal Turn in Sociology and Feminism,” Anne Witz own subject formation. The book explores how difficult and Anatomy of the World, I recall here in fragments: writes: “Simultaneously, woman is saturated with, while man is divested complex it is to “give an account” that is truthful to another of, corporeality and she is divested while he is invested with sociality. The who asks it of us. If the “I” is constituted in the relation with a When that rich soul which to her heaven is gone, absent women in sociology were the women in the body excluded from the “you” then the first question (as philosopher Adriana Cavarero, Whom all do celebrate, who know they have one social. It is male bodies which animate the social – they appear for a fleeting whom Butler quotes, also suggests as a constitutive sociality of (For who is sure he hath a soul, unless moment, only to disappear immediately, in the space between ‘corporeality’ the self12) is how can I give an account of what precedes me as a It see, and judge, and follow worthiness, and ‘sociality.’ Thus, it is not simply a case of recuperating bodies into the knowing subject, and therefore exceeds me? According to Butler, And by deeds praise it? He who doth not this, social, but of excavating the gendered subtexts whereby gendered bodies were such an attempt is bound to failure because of the fundamental May lodge an inmate soul, but ’tis not his) differently inscribed into and out of the social in the first place. The crucial opacity of ourselves to ourselves – a concept she borrows from ... point here is not the more familiar story of her saturation with corporeality psychoanalytical notions about the impossibility of access to This great consumption to a fever turn’d, but the less familiar one of what happened to his body – how, that is, did ourselves in the early period of our life prior to the emergence of And so the world had fits; it joy’d, it mourn’d; male sociologists effect the disappearance of their own bodies in the textual a consciousness, which appears only in the moment it is able to And, as men think, that agues physic are, strategies of sociology?”, in Body and Society, June 2000, vol. 6, no. 21–24: respond to that first address. And th’ ague being spent, give over care, http://bod.sagepub.com/content/6/2/1, accessed August 26, 2016.

16 Ed Atkins Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Giving an Account of Oneself. Talk About That in 5516 words 17